Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound
Playwright George Bernard Shaw on why we need unreasonable people:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — in other words, when it comports with reality, we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn the some lessons.
Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.
When rules of thumb work, they’re very handy for the amateur record collector looking for better than average sound. It’s all the times that they don’t work that are the problem — the exceptions to the rule, especially if one of those exceptions just happens to be a favorite album of yours.
Then you’re really up a creek. You followed a general rule that usually works, but has in this case failed, and now you really don’t have any other way to find a solution to your problem.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, we do, and we share that knowledge with you.
We pride ourselves on being unreasonable when it comes to the garbage that is being foisted on unsuspecting record buyers.
As of 2024, we’ve even started to reveal a great deal of stamper and pressing information, the kind you are reading about in this very listing.
Predicting
The reality is that most of the time we are not able to predict which stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.
Although it’s true that there are many pressings in which one set of stampers always wins, the odds are greater that any particular pressing with those stampers may do well but won’t win, and it sometimes happens that some pressings with those stampers won’t do well at all.
This is why we have to do shootouts, and why you have to do them too, if finding the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.
I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are close to 200 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them, painful and costly as those experiences may have been.